Tofu

History

Tofu almost certainly began in China, but nobody knows when ¹.

The prince. The most famous story credits Liu An, King of Huainan, who lived from 179 to 122 BCE ¹. China's great sixteenth-century herbal, the Bencao Gangmu, repeats it, and many sources still do ¹²³. Shurtleff and Aoyagi call it the best known theory and "probably the least likely to be true". The scholarly book Liu An sponsored never mentions tofu, and nobody links his name to it for more than a thousand years after his death ¹. One later legend even says he ate tofu, grew younger, sprouted wings and flew to heaven ¹. Japan's national tofu association also notes there's no written record of tofu before the Tang dynasty, so the Liu An story can't be confirmed ².

The other theories. Some suggest a happy accident: a cook seasoned a soybean soup with unrefined sea salt and watched it curdle ¹. Others suggest the technique came from India, or from dairying peoples on China's northern frontier who made cheese ¹. Shinoda, whom Shurtleff and Aoyagi call Japan's foremost authority on the history of Chinese food, favoured the last idea ¹.

The insult. Here's the fun bit. Shinoda argued that when the Chinese wrote down the nomads' word for a cultured milk food, rufu, they used a character for fu that also meant "spoiled", partly out of contempt for the herders. Later, dou (bean) replaced ru (milk), giving doufu: literally "spoiled bean". As Shurtleff and Aoyagi put it, the insult boomeranged ¹. It's a theory, not a fact, but it's a good one.

The first record. The oldest known written mention of doufu comes from around 950 CE. It tells of a poor official who couldn't afford mutton, so he ate tofu with his rice every day. Locals nicknamed it "the vice mayor's mutton" ¹. By the Ming dynasty, rich and poor alike were eating it ¹.

To Japan and beyond. Tofu probably reached Japan with Buddhist monks travelling between the two countries, sometime between about 900 and 1100, though Japan's tofu association notes some accounts put it as early as the Nara period (710–784) ¹². Its first Japanese mention is in the diary of a priest at Kasuga Shrine in Nara, who listed it among offerings at the altar in 1182 or 1183 (the date depends on how you convert the old calendar) ¹². Tofu spread to Korea around the same period, and Chinese migrants carried it to Southeast Asia: the Malay and Indonesian word tauhu comes straight from southern Chinese dialects ¹. In the United States, tofu was made from the early twentieth century, but sales only took off around 1970 ³.